Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   wake & vape
Tuesday, August 4 2015
Still on Adirondacks time, I awoke early this morning and decided to take a bath, as morning is a great time for that particular activity. I kicked things up a notch by first taking a solid puff on my pot vaporizer, and this filled my head with ideas. In the bathtub, I stared at the ceiling and thought of a brain-dead (but potentially effective) product idea: alcohol water. Packaged in non-flashy clear plastic bottles with blue writing, the contents would be water and a 5% solution of ethyl alcohol. The idea would be that this product would become the go-to beverage for cryptoalcoholics trying to appear to be health nuts. They could drink it directly from the bottle or pour it into a travel bottle and drink it from there. Ultimately it would be a marketing play, and I don't see what would keep it from becoming extremely popular.
Another idea concerned Hillary Clinton and her apparent inability to deploy the upper half of her face when smiling. My hunch is that she gets routine botox injections so as to avoid appearing to be the age she actually is. Clearly, though, her face needs to retain some capacity to express delight and empathy if she hopes to be a successful presidential candidate. My guess is that somewhere out there is a botox specialist who would be able to provide the balanced injection protocol Hillary requires. My question is this: why isn't that specialist calling the Hillary campaign? And why isn't that campaign seeking that specialist out?
A final idea followed from thoughts about Hillary's aging face, and it concerned aging generally and whether humans would ever be able to control it. A good start to understanding aging would be to look at organisms that are very similar except for the speed with which they age. Their genomes should be closely examined for differences. In the absence of that, geneticists should study the genetic differences of children suffering from progeria and similar diseases, though I have a feeling they already do.
After the bath, I was feeling sleepy once more, so I climbed in the bed, wet hair and all, and slept for a couple more hours.

The internet hadn't been working since I got back from jury duty yesterday, and I'd called Verizon and learned (after suffering through all the pointless troubleshooting they reflexively put customers through) that there was actually an ongoing local outage. Later we would learn that 90 households had been affected when something bad happened in a wiring closet near the Hurley Mountain Inn. Today I called Verizon again to confirm the local outage story; last night it had seemed like a too-convenient method for ending my call when the tech support person failed to fix my problem. But today's tech support woman (whose Indian accent was almost completely unintelligible) confirmed that yes, there was a local outage. She also said it would take 24 to 48 hours to fix. I had a couple of clients with web issues that needed addressing, and I wasn't going to make them wait 48 hours. So late this morning I drove the Subaru to Uptown, parked near the Ulster County Courthouse, and walked to Outdated. As I passed the courthouse, I saw one of the jury alternates selected yesterday coming back from the street clutching a smoothie. I felt bad for her; there are few jobs as unsatisfying as being a jury alternate.
At Outdated, I ordered a VBLT (a vegan BLT) and proceeded to all my usual computer stuff, starting with a quick tour of my usual sites. In less than an hour, I was able to fix a bug in a web application caused by an un-escaped single quote in an Irish surname and then diagnose a data issue in a totally different web application.
On the drive home, I stopped at my dirt mine area across Wynkoop from the Hurley Mountain Inn and gathered three more buckets of topsoil, ultimately earmarked for the cabbage patch.
Gretchen was just about to head into town when I got home. The internet was back on, but she had some errands to run and wondered if I wanted to go with her to check out flooring solutions for our basement. She's been contemplating ripping up all the stained and nasty 12.5 year old carpet and replacing it with cork, which, she'd discovered, resists mold and rot. So we and the dogs piled into the car and headed into town, doing Gretchen's errands along the way, first at the Hurley library, then at Nekos pharmacy. The cork flooring provider was at some address on Ulster Avenue that Google Maps insisted was south of Kingston in Port Ewen (a place we rarely go to). Gretchen had assumed it was in Kingston, where there is also an Ulster Avenue, but what the hell, we followed Google Maps' instructions only to be dumped at an intersection with no flooring business at all. Not knowing what else to do, we drove all the way back into Kingston and checked its Ulster Avenue for the same address. Finding nothing there, we gave up and went to Carpet One instead. They're the people who have installed most of our flooring and carpet in the past. Andy, the guy we usually work with, was there, though he was a bit swamped at the moment. As we were considering the various cork options, Gretchen happened to notice a very convincing woodlike product beneath her feet. As it turned out, the product was not actually wood but instead a patterned vinyl (similar to linoleum). The great thing about it was that it was completely waterproof. In the past, I'd semi-jokingly suggested we just buy rolls of Carpet One's faux-wood linoleum, which are actually pretty convincing. But she'd balked. Now, though, this stuff was worth considering. The thing that switched us decisively from comtemplating cork to embracing fake wood-grain vinyl was when Andy said that cork didn't respond well to cat urine. So we arranged to have Andy come out and make some measurements. Meanwhile our dogs were out in the Prius with the engine running and the air conditioning on. It was so quiet that a guy who'd come in to transact some flooring business felt the need to confront Gretchen about the welfare of our dogs.
At Marshall's, we bought a huge dog bed for use by Eleanor in our bedroom, since she's been sleeping on the floor there. And then we went to PetSmart and got a second intra-seat dog barricade to contain Ramona in the backseat of the Prius. The barricade had proved its worth on the recent Adirondack trip.
From Kingston, we drove directly to Middle Deep (off Zena Road near Woodstock) via Sawkill Road. Unfortunately we ran into the boyfriend (husband?) of Gretchen's bookstore boss in the Little Deep parking lot, and the two proceeded to have a long conversation for which I had nothing to contribute, so I broke away with Ramona and headed to Middle Deep on my own. Eleanor refused to join me, insisting on waiting for the conversation to conclude. The water at Middle Deep was as low as I'd ever seen it. While Gretchen did a bunch of swimming and both dogs did some as well, the most I did was wade in no deeper than my belly button.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?150804

feedback
previous | next